For those who were celebrating, hope you had a lovely thanksgiving weekend. Things around here were fairly mellow, though progress continues.

The thumper-to-oscar conversion is still on schedule. In fact, just minutes ago we dropped the old spike table now that all those spikes were copied into the current spike table. It's amazing how fast you can drop a table containing 1.3 billion rows, though I did feel a disturbance in the force.

This morning we stopped the assimilators so the database is in a quiescent state. We're now backing it up one last time, and tomorrow morning we hope to "recover" oscar using this backup, which means it'll get populated with all current scientific data. This may take a day, and then we'll burn it in by starting up the assimilators again, maybe run some NTPCkrs. If all goes well we're still on for opening the floodgates again early next week.

In the meantime Jeff and I continue to rearrange the closet, cleaning it up, shuffling servers between racks and breakers to regain some organizational sanity. We also were tired of having the kvm monitor on top of the rack which was hard to read from down below. This picture shows the current status of things, including the monitor now nicely at eye level.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

I'm still concerned about ventilation after seeing that picture. If the new servers get too hot, the project is at risk of going down again.
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What if Fiction was Fact and Fact was Fiction and vice versa?

Since the work that out in the field on client computers would be minimal when restarting the project perhaps the "resend" option could be turned on at the servers to eliminate the ghost problem.
____________Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....

Since the work that out in the field on client computers would be minimal when restarting the project perhaps the "resend" option could be turned on at the servers to eliminate the ghost problem.

The resend option only increases server load. So not a good idea.

And as every computer in the universe has no tasks and will be trying to make contact. It would be better to decrease the downloads/processor so that the host gets enough work for a few hours, and set the server enforced back-off to 60 mins and not the default 11 sec. The lower the server load the less likely chance of ghosts.

Excellent. Thanks for the update and pic. If I might ask, how much trouble would it be to replace your non-standard rack with a standard rack so that all the servers fit properly without having to be jury rigged?

And as every computer in the universe has no tasks and will be trying to make contact. It would be better to decrease the downloads/processor so that the host gets enough work for a few hours, and set the server enforced back-off to 60 mins and not the default 11 sec. The lower the server load the less likely chance of ghosts.

Not "every computer in the universe"... just every computer that has BOINC AND has connected to SETI...! (~ ½ a million, the last time I looked...)
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Excellent. Thanks for the update and pic. If I might ask, how much trouble would it be to replace your non-standard rack with a standard rack so that all the servers fit properly without having to be jury rigged?

A new rack shouldn't be that expensive, should it?

The main problem, as Matt has explained, is that there is no such a thing as a "standard rack" - every manufacturer seems to have their own (non compatible) standard...

The main problem with those cheap twist-ties is that the binding is metal, which can cause problems in a high-speed high-density data environment...
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Excellent. Thanks for the update and pic. If I might ask, how much trouble would it be to replace your non-standard rack with a standard rack so that all the servers fit properly without having to be jury rigged?

A new rack shouldn't be that expensive, should it?

The main problem, as Matt has explained, is that there is no such a thing as a "standard rack" - every manufacturer seems to have their own (non compatible) standard...

Well, if it was I In charge, I'd give these guys a call (or a similar vendor)
http://www.racksolutions.com/home/all-products-by-photo/server-racks-cabinets-enclosures.html "Fits any server" and see if they can build me one that works.

The main problem with those cheap twist-ties is that the binding is metal, which can cause problems in a high-speed high-density data environment...